It's what you make of it.

Students from Auckland’s Media Design School (MDS) have used elaborate Visual Effects trickery to enliven backdrops for the Auckland Ballet Theatre’s traditional Christmas performance of the Nutcracker Suite. The show, at the Rose Centre (School Road, Belmont, North Shore) featured performers aged from delightful tottering toddlers through to budding dancers in their late teens, and played the week leading up to Christmas 2008.

The project was a collaboration between students studying Visual Effects and Motion Graphics at MDS and the Auckland Ballet Theatre. Each backdrop corresponds to the appropriate scene in the show and features elaborate and visually arresting graphics and animation sequences. The backdrop sequences were all original takes on a common brief that all students received. The backdrops were projected onto a screen behind the dancers and provide da uniquely contemporary nod to one of the most traditional of Christmas shows.